JIMMIE HIGGINS PUTS ON KHAKI
I
There were seven fellows who boarded the train that evening, under
the temporary charge of a blacksmith from the near by country. At
seven o'clock next morning they presented their papers at the
entrance-gate of the training-camp, and under the escort of a
soldier were marched down the main street, hanging on to their
bundles and suit-cases, and staring about them at the sights.
It was a city inhabited by some forty thousand men, on a site which
a year ago had been waste scrub-land. Long rows of wooden buildings
stretched in every direction--barracks, dining-rooms, study-rooms,
offices, store-houses--with great stretches of exercise and
training-grounds between. Just to see this city, with its swarming
population of young men, all in uniform, erect, eager, well-set-up
and vivid with health, every man of them busy, and every man
seemingly absorbed in his job--that alone was a worth-while
experience. It was a new kind of city--a city without a loafer,
without a drunkard, without a parasite. The seven working-men from
Leesville felt suddenly slouchy and disgraced, with their
ill-fitting civilian clothes and their miscellaneous bundles and
suitcases.
The first thing they did with the new arrivals was to make them
clean, to fumigate and vaccinate them. In a Socialist local one
meets all sorts of eccentrics, the lunatic-fringe of the movement,
and so it happened that Jimmie had listened to a tirade against the
diabolical practice of inoculation, which caused more deadly
diseases than it was supposed to prevent. But the medical officers
of this camp did not stop to ask Jimmie's conclusions on that vital
subject; they just told him to roll up the sleeve of his left arm,
and proceeded to wipe his skin clean and scratch it with a needle.
And then came the tailor, to do him up in khaki. This also was
something the little machinist had not bargained for; he had taken
it as a matter of course that he would be allowed to work for Uncle
Sam in any old clothes, just as he had done for Abel Granitch. But
no--he must have an outfit, complete even to a tooth-brush, which
they would show him how to use. Having been done up neat and tight
in khaki, with a motor-wheel on his sleeve to show his branch of the
service, he stood and looked at himself in the glass, experiencing a
demoralizing and unworthy excitement. He was every bit as handsome
as Comrade Stankewitz! When he walked down the street would the
girls giggle, and turn to look at him, as they did at the sedate and
proper Comrade Emil? So the meshes of Militarism were being woven
about the soul of Jimmie Higgins.
II
Jimmie was in quarantine, not allowed to go out of camp on account
of his typhoid and other vaccinations, There was enough about the
place to have interested him; but, alas, he became suddenly very
sick, and was terrified to realize that the opponent of inoculation
must have been right. His health had been undermined for ever, he
would suffer from a dozen obscure diseases! He went to the hospital,
miserable in body and still more miserable in mind; but in a couple
of days he began to feel better, and listened to the nurses, who
told him cheerfully that everybody felt that way for a bit. Then he
got up, and had several free days in which to complete his
recovery--days which he spent in wandering about the camp, watching
the fascinating sights.
It was like a circus with hundreds of rings. The drilling and
marching he had seen in the Leesville square were here going on
wholesale. Hundreds of groups were being put through squad-drill and
the manual, while other groups were having special kinds of
exercises--climbing up walls, digging trenches, making roads,
shooting at targets. It rained every other day, and the ground was a
morass, but no one paid the least attention to that; the men came in
plastered with mud, and steaming like lard-vats. They seemed to
enjoy it; nothing ever interfered with their bantering and jokes.
Jimmie watched them with alternating moods of curiosity and horror;
for the things that were done here brought the war, with its
infinite and multiform wickedness, before his very eyes. Here was a
group of men being taught to advance under fire; crawling on their
bellies on the ground, jumping from one hummock to another, flinging
themselves down and pretending to fire. A man in front, supposed to
have a machine-gun, was shouting when he had “got” them. Now they
unslung their little trenching-tools, and began to burrow themselves
like wood-chucks into the ground. “Dig, you sons o' guns, dig!” the
officer would shout. “Keep your head down, Smith! Make the dirt fly!
Put the jazz into it! That's the stuff!”
Jimmie had never watched football practice, so he had no conception
of the efforts to which men could be goaded by “coaching”. It was
abhorrent--yet also it was fascinating, the spell of it got hold of
him. He saw what these men were doing; they were learning to act in
masses, to act with paralyzing and terrific force. Whatever it was
they did, they did with the smash of a battering-ram. You saw the
fire in their eyes, the grim, set look on their faces; you knew that
they were not going to war with any hesitations or divided minds.
You would move over a rise in the ground, and come upon a bunch of
them at bayonet-practice. You didn't require imagination to get the
hang of this; they had dummies made of leather, and they rushed at
these figures, hacking, stabbing--and here was the most amazing part
of it, shouting with rage. Actually the officers taught them to
yell, to snarl, to work up their feelings to a fury! It was
blood-curdling--Jimmie turned away from it sick. It was just what he
had been arguing for three years and a half--you had to make
yourself into a wild beast in order to go to war!
Also Jimmie watched the target-ranges, from which came all day a
rattle of shots, like the whirr of many typewriters. Companies of
men came marching, and spread themselves out along the firing-steps,
and under the direction of instructors proceeded to contribute their
quota to the noise. Over by the targets were others who kept score
and telephoned the results; so all day long, winter or summer, rain
or shine, men were learning to kill their fellows, mechanically, as
if it were a matter of factory routine. At other ranges were moving
targets, where sharp-shooters were acquiring skill; you noticed that
their targets were never birds and deer, as at the
shooting-galleries which Jimmie had seen at the beaches and at Socialist
picnics. No, they were the heads or bodies of men, and each body
painted a greenish grey, matching the uniforms of the enemy.
III
So day by day Jimmie lived with the idea of killing, confronting the
grim and ferocious face of war. He had thought that repairing
motor-cycles would be pretty much the same anywhere you did it; but
he found that it was one thing to repair motor-cycles to be ridden
by errand-boys and working-men out for a holiday with their
sweethearts, and another and entirely different thing to repair them
for fighting-men and dispatch-couriers. Jimmie was driven more
insistently than ever to make up his mind about this war. It was
every day less easy for him to hold two contradictory sets of
opinions.
All the men he now met were of one opinion, and by no possibility to
be persuaded to consider any other. Jimmie found that he could get
them to agree that after this war for democracy there would be vast
changes in this world, the people would never more let themselves be
hoodwinked and exploited as they had; he found that he could
interest them in the idea of having the government run the great
industries, producing food and clothing for the people as it was now
producing them for the troops. But when he tried to give this
programme the name of Socialism, then the trouble began. Weren't
Socialists the lunatics who wanted to have America “lay down” like
Russia? The premise from which all discussion started with these men
was that America was going to win the war; if you tried to hint that
this matter could so much as be hesitated over, you met, first sharp
mockery, and then angry looks, and advice to go and take a pill and
get the Hun poison out of your system.
Nor was there any use trying to talk about the dangers of
militarism. These men knew all about the dangers of militarism--for
the Kaiser. The man who is at the buttend of a gun, and knows how to
aim it so as to pick off a cat at six hundred yards--that man will
let the cat do the worrying. So, at any rate, the matter seemed to
these husky young recruits, who were learning to march in the mud
and sleep in the rain and chew up carpet-tacks and grind Huns into
leber-wurst. They were putting through the job--with a fierce and
terrifying gaiety; they exulted in their toughness, they called
themselves “grizzlies” and “mountain cats” and what not; they sang
wild songs about their irritability, their motto was “Treat 'em
rough!” It was a scary atmosphere for a dreamer and utopian; Jimmie
Higgins shrank into himself, afraid even to reach about for some
fellow-Socialist with whom he might exchange opinions about the
events of the outside world.
IV
In the evening there were picture-shows, concerts, lectures-nearly
all dealing with the war, of course. They were held in big halls
built by the Y.M.C.A., an organization for which Jimmie had a hearty
contempt. He regarded it as a device of the exploiting classes to
teach submission to their white-collar slaves. But nobody could live
in a training-camp without being aware of the “Y”. Jimmie was
invited to a lecture, and out of boredom he went.
It was Sergeant Ebenezer Collins, imported from Flanders to tell the
“doughboys” about the wiles of the Hun. Sergeant Collins spoke a
weird language which Jimmie had never heard before, and not all of
which he could understand; it served, however, to convince him that
the sergeant was genuine--for nobody could possibly have faked such
a form of utterance! “When yer gow inter Wipers naow,” said the
orator, “yer see owld, grye-headed lydies an' bybies like little
wite gowsts, an' yer sye ter them, 'Gow-a-wye, the 'Un may be 'ere
ter-dye,' but they wown't gow, they got now 'omes ter gow ter!”
But in spite of the difficulties of a foreign language, you realized
that this Cockney sergeant was a man. For one thing he had a sense
of humour; he had kept it in the midst of terror and death--kept it
standing all night in trenches full of icy-cold water, with icy-cold
water pouring down his collar. Also the sergeant had a sense of
honour--there were things he could not do to a 'Un, even though the
'Un might do them to him. Jimmie had listened to excited debates in
Local Leesville, as to whether the Allies were really any better
than the Germans; whether, for example, the Allies would have sunk
passenger-liners with women and babies on board, if it had been
necessary in order to win the war. Sergeant Collins did not debate
this question, he just revealed himself as a fighting man. “It's
because we plye gymes, an' they down't,” he remarked. “If yer plye
gymes, yer now 'ow to plye fair.”
For three years and eight months Jimmie had been hearing stories
about atrocities, and for three years and eight months he had been
refusing to believe them. But now the Cockney sergeant told about a
pal who had been wounded in a night attack by the 'Uns, and the
sergeant had tried to carry him back and had had to leave him;
towards dawn they made a counter-attack, and retook the village, and
there they found the sergeant's pal, still alive, in spite of the
fact that he was spiked to a barn-door with bayonets through his
hands and feet. When that story was told, you heard a low murmur run
through the room and saw a couple of thousand young men clenching
their hands and setting their jaws, getting ready for their big job
in France.
“Just now,” said the sergeant, “the Germans were making the most
desperate attack of the war. The British were at bay, with their
backs against the wall. It was upon the men in the training-camps of
America that the decision rested; there was no one but them to save
the day, to save the rest of the world from falling under the hoofs
of the Hun monster. Would they do their part?” Jimmie Higgins heard
the answer from those two thousand young throats, and the pacifist
in him shrunk deeper out of sight.
But the pacifist was never entirely silent. War was wrong! War was
wrong! It was a wicked and brutal way for human beings to settle
their disagreements. If human beings were not yet intelligent enough
to listen to reason--well, even so, that didn't make war right! A
man had to have principles, and to stand by them--how else could he
make the world come his way? Yes, war was wrong! But, meantime, war
was here; and calling it wrong did not put a stop to it! What the
devil was a fellow to do?
V
As soon as Jimmie was able to work, they took him to the part of the
camp where a motor-cycle division was training. Here was a big
repair-shop, with plenty of damaged machines upon which he might
display his skill. He did not know the particular engine they used
here, but he soon learned the secrets of it, and satisfied the
officers in charge that he knew how to take one apart and put it
together again, to replace and mend tyres, to clean ball-bearings
and true crooked rims. “You're all right,” they said. “And you're
needed like the devil over there. You won't have to wait long.”
There was a platform where the trains came into the camp, and every
few hours now there came a long train to be loaded with men. Jimmie
got his notice, and packed his kit and answered roll call and took
his place; at sundown of the next day he was detrained at a
“mobilization-camp”--another huge city, described in the cautious
military fashion as “Somewhere in New Jersey”, though everybody
within a hundred miles knew its exact location. Here was a port,
created for the purposes of war, with docks and wharves where the
fleets of transports were loaded with supplies and troops. The
vessels sailed in fleets, carrying thirty or forty thousand men at
once. From the port of New York alone there was going out a fleet
like this every week--the answer of America to the new drive of the
Hun.
One met here, not merely the fighting-men, but the forces of all the
complicated service behind the lines: gangs of lumbermen from the
far North-west, who were to fell the forests of France and make them
into railroad-ties and timber for trenches; railway-men, miners, and
construction-gangs, engineers and signalmen, bridge-builders and
road-makers, telephone-linemen and operators, the drivers of forty
thousand motor-cars and of five thousand locomotives; bakers and
cooks, menders of shoes and of clothing, farmers to till the soil of
France, and doctors and nurses to tend its sick and wounded. There
was nothing which the skill and knowledge of a nation of a hundred
million people had to offer that was not gathered into this vast
encampment. All the youngest and keenest were here, eager to do
their part, laughing at danger, tingling with excitement, on tip-toe
with curiosity and delight. Jimmie Higgins, watching them, found his
doubts melting like an April snow-storm. How could any man see this
activity and not be caught up in it? How could he be with these
laughing boys and not share their mood?
Jimmie himself had not had a merry childhood, he did not know the
youth of his own country--the breezy, slangy, rather shocking,
utterly irrepressible youth of this democratic world. If there was
anything they did not know--well, they did not know it; if there was
anything they could not do--their motto was: “Show me!” Jimmie, not
having been to school, found himself having a hard time with their
weird slang. When one of these fellows hailed you, “Hey, pimp!” it
did not necessarily mean that he did not like you: when he greeted
you, “Hey, sweetness!” it did not mean that he felt for you any
over-powering affection. If he referred to his officer as
“hard-boiled”, he did not have in mind that this officer had been
exposed to the action of water at 212 degrees Fahrenheit; he merely
meant that the officer was a snob. When he remarked, “Good night!”
in broad daylight, he meant you to understand that he disagreed with
you.
He disagreed frequently and explosively with Jimmie Higgins, trying
to point out a difference between the German rulers and the German
people! Such subtleties had no interest for these all-knowing boys.
When Jimmie persisted, they called him a “nut”, a “poor cheese”;
they told him that he was “cuckoo”, that his “trolley was twisted”;
they made whirling motions with their hands to indicate that he had
“wheels in his head”, they made flapping motions over him to signify
that there were “bats in his belfry”. So Jimmie subsided, and let
them talk their own talk--imploring one another to “have a heart”,
or to “get wise”, or to “make it snappy”, or to “cut out the rough
stuff”. And he would sit and listen while they sang with zest a song
telling about what they were going to do when they got to France:
Bring the good old bugle, boys, we'll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will move the world along,
Sing it as we love to sing it, just two million strong--
While we are canning the Kaiser.
CHORUS:
Oh, Bill! Oh, Bill! We're on the job to-day!
Oh, Bill! Oh, Bill! We'll seal you so you'll stay!
We'll put you up in ginger in the good old Yankee way--
While we are canning the Kaiser.
Hear the song we're singing on the shining roads of France;
Hear the Tommies cheering, and see the Poilus prance;
Africanders and Kanucks and Scots without their pants--
While we are canning the Kaiser. (Chorus)
Bring the guns from Bethlehem, by way of old New York;
Bring the beans from Boston, and don't leave out the pork;
Bring a load of soda-pop and pull the grape-juice cork--
While we are canning the Kaiser. (Chorus)
Come you men from Dixieland, you lumberjacks of Maine;
Come you Texas cowboys, and you farmers of the plain;
Florida to Oregon, we boast the Yankee strain--
While we are canning the Kaiser. (Chorus)
Now we've started on the job we mean to put it through;
Ship the kings and kaisers all, and make the world anew;
Clear the way for common folk, for men like me and you--
While we are canning the Kaiser.
CHORUS:
Oh, Bill! Oh, Bill! We're on the job to-day!
Oh, Bill! Oh, Bill! We'll seal you so you'll stay!
We'll put you up in ginger in the good old Yankee way--
While we are canning the Kaiser.